Have you ever considered using an outsource engineering design office ?

Many engineering companies may not see or fully understand the benefits of using an external resource to outsource their design work to, or may not like to consider it as an option. There is often fear of not having control over a project once it has been outsourced, but with a company such as ourselves, you can relax knowing it will be in safe hands. See below for some of the main benefits you can gain from sub contracting your design work.

Benefits of outsourcing include :

Improves reliability and service quality

Lessens potential impact of any risks that are taken e.g. taking on new staff in a hurry

Your business will become more flexible to change

Frees up human resources, allowing your staff to focus on their main responsibilities

Reduces overheads

Why outsource engineering design projects ?

You don’t have the required resources e.g. hardware, software and expertise

You have a project deadline approaching fast, and need extra assistance in order to meet it

You fear a competitor is about to release a rival product sooner than you

To avoid frequent training costs

No need to worry about costly CAD software updates, which can be due on an annual basis

Allows you to call upon the skills and expertise of dedicated, experienced design engineers

Total flexibility to use someone only when you need them

Why outsource to Nova Design ?

Our professional approach is fully geared towards achieving a total quality solution

We possess over 29 years of engineering design experience across several industries

We do not outsource any of our work and all of our projects are kept in-house in our modern design office based in the West Midlands. This is to allow us to monitor quality levels and ensure our work is kept at a consistently high level.

For further details on our engineering design services, why not press the outsource button and make contact with Nova to see how we can assist with your outsource engineering design requirements.

August 1988 – A quick review

1 August 1988 saw beer priced around 91p per pint with the average lager around 98p per pint compared to around the £3.00 per pint mark nowadays.

Trouser pockets also got slightly fuller with coins around this time as the UK pound note was removed from legal tender.

At this time, petrol was hovering just below the £2.00 per gallon mark compared to around £5.05 per gallon in August 2017.

In the UK music charts, pop sensation Kylie Minogue was taking the UK pop charts by storm with hits including “I should be so lucky” and “Locomotion”, whilst new British boyband Bros took five singles into the Top 5 this year including “When Will I Be Famous?”.

The thing that most people were watching was the property prices – around that time even the most modest of flats or houses was creeping up at the rate of at least £1000 per month in places like London.

Somewhat closer to home in Kingswinford, West Midlands, 1 August 1988 saw the first day of trading for a new supplier of sub contract engineering design services based in the West Midlands – Nova Design was born 🙂

1 August 2017 sees Nova Design celebrating 29 years in business, all this time providing subcontract engineering design services to a variety of industries across the West Midlands, the UK and into Europe.

Nova was started by Dave Parry (Nova’s Managing Director) and business commenced on the second floor of Pensnett House in Kingswinford around 500 metres from our current location.

Early Mechanical Engineering Design

In those early days, engineering design was still very much a manual industry and at its inception Nova consisted of 10 drawing boards, one typewriter, a card index for sales and a simple phone system along with Dave, Julia and a small team of design engineers and draughtsmen. The total number of design engineers employed by Nova Design both internally and externally was around 15.

Early clients were mainly in the aerospace industry with turbine blade tooling projects comprising a large percentage of the internal project work together with projects in the construction industry based around curtain walling and cladding.

Mechanical Engineering Design Software

As technology moved on and IT hardware / software became more commercially available, Nova Design were one of the first mechanical design offices to invest in this modern design tool called CAD – Computer Aided Design. To put things into perspective, Nova’s first CAD workstations ran on Windows 3.1.1 (the last .1 being the network edition of Windows 3.1), had <300MB hard drives and a massive 4MB of RAM ! As a measure of the progression of technology, the current iPhone 7 has 2GB of RAM and a minimum of 32GB internal drive capacity.

Expanding the floor area of Nova and running alongside the drawing boards, Nova initially invested in 6 seats of Bentley Microstation 2D software. At this time, Nova were providing mechanical engineering design services for a company called Haden Drysys who were heavily involved in the mechanical handling and trim & final areas for Land Rover (now Jaguar Land Rover) in Solihull.

The use of CAD took off quickly within the mechanical design industry and AutoCAD became the industry standard for mechanical design, something Dave realised early on and Nova invested in a number of seats, allowing more design work to be achieved in less time than traditional manual methods.

Over the years, Nova Design have invested in additional CAD systems and associated design tools including Mathcad for calculations, Ansys DesignSpace for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and a variety of CAD libraries to speed up the design process.

Nova Becomes A Family Business

In 1995, Dave’s youngest son Nick joined Nova. With a HNC in Mechanical Engineering gained from his apprenticeship at Dowty Aerospace in Wolverhampton, Nick bought many years of mechanical design experience to Nova. Now Engineering Director, Nick is responsible for the smooth running of the internal design office from project quotation through to final delivery of manufacture drawings / 3D CAD models as appropriate.

September 1997 saw Dave’s eldest son, Simon join the family business. Working his way up to Business Development Director, Simon is responsible for all areas of sales and marketing together with Quality Assurance and IT.

Around 2001, the CAD market was undergoing a revolution – higher end 3D CAD software was becoming commercially available and more importantly, coming available on a Windows software platform. Autodesk Mechanical Desktop was one of the first 3D mechanical design systems Nova Design invested in and the first project undertaken was the detailed design of stainless steel guarding systems for Cadbury’s in Bourneville, Birmingham.

A New Location – Expansion

May 2005 saw Nova Design move from Pensnett House to our current location in the Innovation Centre on Pensnett Trading Estate. This move allowed Nova to expand the number of seats in our mechanical design office to the current total of 40. With our design engineers working around 50 hours a week, Nova’s internal design capacity is around 2000 hours per week. Internally and externally, the total number of employees has now exceeded the 60 mark.

Quality Assured – “Right First Time”

From a business management perspective, Nova’s management team is committed to the future and our vision statement including the line “Right First Time”.

To this end, Nova have successfully implemented and run a quality system for a number of years. Beginning with BS5750 and now running a regularly audited ISO 9001:2008 system, Nova are certified for the “Provision Of Engineering Design Services”. Internally and with the assistance of our external consultants, our current goal is to be certified to the latest 9001:2015 standard by Xmas 2017.

Detailed design of water treatment projects – design and detail of new screening systems – end client Severn Trent and Anglian Water Boards

Design and detailed design of Ground Support Equipment for gas turbines – industrial power generation – end client Industrial Turbine Company UK Limited – UK and North America sites

Site surveys, layouts, design and detailed design of mechanical handling equipment – trim and final area of vehicle production – various sites – end client Jaguar Land Rover

Detailed design of a number of new cranes – end client – Nuclear Decommissioning Authority – Sellafield Limited

An Eye On The Future

From a recruitment perspective, Nova Design are continually looking for additional staff to join our ranks, ranging from graduates looking for their first employment through to more experienced engineers looking for a change of career direction. Working closely with Dudley College, Wolverhampton University and Birmingham University engineering departments Nova are committed to assisting the next generation of students into the world of engineering design and manufacturing.

Trent XWB Engine Assembly

Showcasing their engine assembly process, Rolls Royce plc have recently released this video showing one of the latest generation Trent XWB gas turbine engines being assembled.

A large number of the engine assembly tools for these procedures were designed by Nova either using previous engine tools as typical examples or from scratch as blank sheet engineering design projects.

The Trent XWB engine is currently in service with a number of airline carrier companies and flies on the Airbus A350-900 aircraft.

For those readers with an interest in the aerospace industry, the XWB engine installations on Airbus A350-900 aircraft can be tracked on flightradar24.com with Aircraft code ‘A359’.

Although unprecedented, the Trent XWB’s performance is not unexpected. It’s the 6th generation engine in the Rolls Royce Trent family, and has evolved from over 70 million hours of Trent family experience.

With a 15 per cent fuel consumption advantage over the original Trent engine, it hits current and future emissions targets, goes further on less fuel and offers world beating performance and noise levels.

Such is the demand for the Trent XWB that Rolls-Royce have recently officially opened a new engine assembly line for its Trent XWB engines in Dahlewitz, Germany, complementing its main engine assembly production line in Derby, UK, and marking the first time that complete large civil engines have been assembled in Germany.

Rolls Royce Trent XWB 97 Civil Aerospace Engine

The new engine assembly line will help meet the exceptional demand for Rolls-Royce’s Trent XWB engines by delivering up to two engines per week by the end of the year. Combining this with the capacity to deliver up to five Trent XWB engines from its main production line in Derby means that Rolls-Royce will be able to deliver one Trent XWB engine per day at peak.

The factory is an important production and development facility in the global Rolls-Royce group, assembling both the successful BR700 engine family and the V2500 engine. The Dahlewitz site also plays a role in the development of the next generation of aircraft engines, hosting a test centre for the power gearbox system which will feature in Rolls-Royce’s UltraFan® engine slated for delivery in the middle of the next decade.

Autodesk Inventor 2018 is released

The Wait Is Over !

Autodesk Inventor 2018 is now available to download and having done so and undertaken a couple of software installations, here’s Nova’s first look at what’s new.

Inventor 2018 is built for the continually evolving needs of the modern engineering design professional and this year, the Product Managers at Autodesk have included over 50 user requested ideas into this release with much of their efforts having being focused on adding professional grade design enhancements, an expansion to interoperability, and general improvements to the user experience.

Building on its breadth of 3D modelling capabilities and powerful design automation tools, Inventor 2018 marks the next step forward in professional grade 3D mechanical engineering design. Interoperability enhancements enable distributed, multi disciplinary teams to work together more efficiently with data from a variety of sources.

These efforts will allow our design engineers to design, engineer and collaborate faster and more effectively than ever before.

Professional Grade Engineering Design

Design engineers constantly need to drive innovation in their design work for better products and more efficient processes. To stay ahead, we need ever faster, more powerful tools that help our engineers to release better performance and productivity. Inventor 2018 appears to deliver just that.

Improvements have been made in several core functionalities our engineers use on a daily basis. Projecting geometry in sketching, multi-body sheet metal parts and part modelling workflows have all been enhanced. Inventor 2018 delivers key performance improvements to large assembly and drawing workflows. Integrated Model Based Definition has been added giving our design engineers the ability to add Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) and 3D Annotations (3DA) to their models streamlining documentation and enable downstream use of the 3D designs for manufacturing and quality processes.

Customer driven enhancements throughout Inventor 2018 have improved core workflows and model interaction. Commands like Chamfer, Assembly Interference Analysis, Extrude and Hole have added useful options, in addition, both the Browser and Measure have been refreshed to deliver a more feature rich experience for all Inventor users.

Model Based Definition

Model Based Definition (MBD), is a powerful new set of tools for adding annotations, Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T), and other manufacturing information directly to a 3D model part.

The integrated Tolerance Advisor checks the health of the tolerance scheme and lists any potential problems, errors, and other information in the Tolerance Advisor browser.

Once the 3D CAD model has MBD and 3D Annotations applied their can be carried through to the 2D manufacture drawings, exported in a 3D PDF or STEP file.

The Inventor interface has been fine tuned based on real-world user feedback. Searching and filtering is more robust. New tabs make navigation quicker.

Information rich interactive panels save design engineers from digging. More drawing data on-screen means fewer clicks. Commands like measure have been refreshed to streamline workflows and provide you more data, more quickly.

Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing

Autodesk Inventor 2018 now has integrated Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T) and 3DA so that users can finally include important information in the 3D model space and accelerate traditional 2D drawing production.

One of the best parts about it is the fact that Inventor automatically recognises tolerance features such as holes, and will use the correct GD&T symbol for that particular definition.

Tip: Go to the Get Started tab > Tutorial Gallery and download the GD&T guided tutorial to get familiar with the new commands.

Sheet Metal

Multibody sheet metal parts now support unique rules and thickness for each body. Multi-body rules can be applied to bodies in the browser, or while creating new bodies within the Face, Contour Flange, Contour Roll, and Lofted Flange dialog.

Drawing Improvements

After selecting an assembly document to place in a drawing, if the preview can display in under 3 seconds it will do so. If it takes longer a Preview progress dialog box displays. The dialog box is the only element you can interact with during its display.

From the Open dialog box you can:

Defer drawings

Turn off model preview

Recover mesh bodies, surface bodies, and all model dimensions

Export to PDF

The From and To values specified for Sheets in range are no longer session based.

The new option, Display Published File in Viewer, when selected, displays the sheets in Adobe Acrobat Reader after clicking Save.

BIM Content

Delivering content for use in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is a key business opportunity for many of Autodesk’s customers. With Inventor 2018, design engineers and CAD operators can remove information and publish their 3D models directly to Revit (.rfa) format – simplifying all CAD models, whilst protecting intellectual property, and reducing file size and complexity.

Expanded Interoperability

Autodesk has made the difficulty of working with foreign CAD files a thing of the past. AnyCAD was released in Inventor 2016, and has seen improvements in both of the last two major releases. Inventor 2018 brings in one of the most requested improvements to that workflow – backwards compatibility. Design engineers can now work between 2017 & 2018 seamlessly, whereas previously the entire engineering design team would need to be on the same version of the software to collaborate. This allows early adopters to take advantage of the newest features, while some can remain in the previous release if needed.

Of course Inventor 2018 can open Inventor 2017 files. But the latest version introduces backwards compatibility allowing Inventor 2017 users to take advantage of AnyCAD to use Inventor 2018 files in their designs. That means when you move to Inventor 2018, your collaborators and suppliers on Inventor 2017 can still reference your data.

AnyCAD

With Inventor 2017.4, AnyCAD has been expanded to allow design engineers and CAD technicians to leverage Inventor 2018 files in your Inventor 2017 designs. This means you can now work with others who are on versions of Inventor that are earlier or later than the version you are working in. To help you identify the version of an Inventor file, the Open dialog now displays Inventor version a file was last saved in.

Starting with Inventor 2017.4, engineers can reference future (newer) versions of Inventor part and assembly files in an earlier version of Inventor. For example, with Inventor 2017.4 you can reference an Inventor 2018 part file in Inventor 2017.

All in all, the latest mechanical engineering design offering from Autodesk appears to offer lots of improvements over previous software releases. We’ll be providing additional feedback when our engineers have pushed the software further in the mechanical engineering design projects undertaken by our internal team of design engineers.

Due to the size and duration of the projects that we undertake in our engineering design office, design reviews are an increasingly important part of our mechanical engineering design process. Conducted either digitally or face to face, they allow us to provide our clients with regular updates before and throughout each design stage.

Catering to a client base which now encompasses the whole of the UK together with current mechanical design projects from both Norway and Canada, digital design reviews are being used on a regular basis to ensure our clients are satisfied with the 3D models and CAD drawings that we are producing, before they are finalised.

Digital design reviews allow us to take away any of our client’s concerns during a project, by showing them exactly what is going on at short notice. We use collaborative tools such as WebEx and Skype to show our clients what is currently being worked on and what has been done so far, giving them several options if they’d like something done a particular way. We know that everyone is unique and has different preferences, therefore initial meetings and possibly additional design reviews are important to understand our client’s requirements. Due to the complexity of our work, digital design reviews are the most efficient way for our clients to highlight any changes or tweaks they may wish to make to a design.

We came to realise a long time ago that our clients often don’t have the time in their diary to meet face to face with us, and therefore introduced digital design reviews. This now allows us to clear up any concerns our clients may have in a matter of minutes, by allowing them to see things for themselves from the comfort of their own office on their own monitor. They have become particularly useful for the larger, more long-term projects that we carry out, allowing us to give our clients peace of mind in terms of meeting their deadlines with high quality, on time deliverables.

Digital design reviews are just one of the tools we use to keep our engineering design clients happy, in order to consistently supply them with CAD drawings and models of the highest quality.

Many engineering companies may not see or fully understand the benefits of outsourcing their engineering design work, or may not like to consider it as an option. There is often fear of not having control over a project once it has been outsourced, but with an outsource engineering design company such as ourselves, you can relax knowing it will be in safe hands. See below for some of the main benefits you can gain from sub contracting your design work.

Benefits of outsourcing include:

Improves reliability and service quality

Lessens potential impact of any risks that are taken e.g. taking on new staff in a hurry

Your business will become more flexible to change

Frees up human resources, allowing your staff to focus on their main responsibilities

Reduces overheads

Why outsource engineering design projects?

You don’t have the required resources e.g. hardware, software and expertise

You have a project deadline approaching fast, and need extra assistance in order to meet it

You fear a competitor is about to release a rival product sooner than you

To avoid frequent training costs

No need to worry about costly CAD software updates, which are usually due on an annual basis

Allows you to call upon the skills and expertise of dedicated, experienced design engineers

Total flexibility to use someone only when you need them

Why outsource to Nova Design?

Our professional approach is fully geared towards achieving a total quality solution

We possess over 20 years experience across several industries

The invaluable experience of our 40 person strong design team

We use the latest tools and technology, all housed inside our modern design facilities

Nova Design – Outsource Engineering Design Drawing Office

We do not outsource any of our work and all of our projects are kept in-house in our modern engineering design office based in the West Midlands. This is to allow us to monitor quality levels and ensure our work is kept at a consistently high level.

For further details on our engineering design services, give us a call on 01384 400044